Tennessee is preparing to put Christa Gail Pike to death on Wednesday morning in what would mark the state’s first execution of a female inmate in at least 200 years. Pike, who was 18 years old when she participated in the 1995 murder of a classmate, is scheduled to die by lethal injection at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville.

Pike, now 50, was convicted alongside her boyfriend for the brutal killing of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, a fellow classmate at a Job Corps vocational training center in Knoxville. Prosecutors said Pike, fearing Slemmer was attempting to steal her boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, lured the victim to a wooded area on Jan. 12, 1995. Slemmer was attacked with a box cutter, beaten with a large chunk of asphalt, and killed.

The crime shocked the city of Knoxville and drew widespread national attention, in part because a pentagram—a star-shaped emblem linked to Satanism—was carved into Slemmer’s chest, and a portion of her skull was taken as a souvenir of the carnage. The presence of the symbol stoked public fears of Satan worship during the tail end of the “satanic panic” of the 1980s and 1990s, and as the execution date drew near, it renewed debate over the death penalty for young offenders.

Shipp admitted to carving the pentagram into the victim’s body. Because he was 17 at the time of the crime, he received a sentence of life in prison with the possibility of parole. A third companion, 18-year-old Shadolla Peterson, acted as a lookout, turned prosecution witness, and received probation. Pike was the only defendant sentenced to death.

The Supreme Court on Tuesday denied a request from Pike’s attorneys to halt the execution, following a decision on Monday by Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee to deny clemency. Pike, the only woman currently on Tennessee’s death row, would also be the only person in the state’s modern era of capital punishment executed for a crime committed as a teenager.

Pike does not deny committing the murder, but her supporters and defense attorneys argue that the state should consider her age at the time, her diagnosed mental illnesses, and a history of extreme childhood trauma and severe sexual abuse, including being raped from the time she was a toddler.

In a 226-page petition submitted to ask the governor to commute her sentence, her lawyers documented rapes at ages 11 and 17, alongside prison diagnoses of bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder. They also presented evidence that heavy maternal drinking during pregnancy impaired her brain development and impulse control. Assistant Federal Defender Stephen Ferrell noted that death sentences for other 18-year-olds in Tennessee have historically been vacated.

Pike expressed remorse for the crime in a statement submitted with her request for mercy: “I was a mentally ill 18-year-old kid. It took me numerous years to even realize the gravity of what I’d done,” Pike said in a statement included in her clemency petition. “Even more to accept how many lives I affected. I took the life of someone’s child, sister, friend. It sickens me now to think I had the ability to commit such a crime.”

After Governor Bill Lee denied clemency, her legal team emphasized her transformation during her decades in custody. “The 18-year-old girl suffering from severe mental illness and near-debilitating trauma no longer exists,” her lawyers wrote in response to Lee’s denial of clemency. “Christa is a 50-year-old remorseful woman who understands her actions, receives proper treatment for her mental illness, and provides for and guides fellow incarcerated women.”

Slemmer’s mother, May Martinez, wants the lethal injection to proceed, stating she has waited decades to see the punishment carried out. “Every time I think about it, I think about Colleen feeling that pain and trying to get up and run,” May Martinez said in a telephone interview. A group helped raise money so Martinez and her husband could travel from Florida to witness the execution.

Pike was also convicted in August 2001 of attempted first-degree murder following an assault on another inmate, according to the Tennessee Department of Correction. Her case has drawn international attention, with United Nations human rights experts recently calling for the commutation of her sentence.

Specialists in sexual violence and trauma have also spoken out, warning that the physical procedures of lethal injection would likely cause Pike to experience severe, traumatic flashbacks to child sexual abuse, adding to the anguish of her execution.

Executions of female inmates remain an extreme rarity across the country. According to Robin M. Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, women represent roughly 1 percent of all executions, accounting for 18 of the 1,683 people put to death nationwide since the Supreme Court reinstated capital punishment in 1976. Older state records can be spotty, making precise details about Tennessee’s last female execution difficult to confirm, though none has occurred in at least 200 years.

Most recently, Missouri in 2023 executed Amber McLaughlin for a 2003 killing, in what is believed to be the first U.S. execution of a transgender woman. In 2021, the federal government executed Lisa Montgomery, marking its first execution of a female inmate in nearly seven decades. Tennessee has executed 17 people in the modern era, though state prison officials in May aborted an execution attempt after failing to locate a suitable vein.